Player Features and Ideas Discussion

That Locator Agent change would be very good and help alleviate the burnout of chasing offline ghosts.

The fact it doesn't provide location on a offline target make it much more difficult (if not impossible, unless visually witnessing the log-off) to find them, though.

Maybe the Locator Agent could tell you if the target is offline and ask if you still want to pursue the Location process nonetheless, though that means more clicking.

Still +1

The aim here is for the bear minimum requirement to get locator agents useful again
with the least effort on CCP's part without undoing the wrecking crew nerf,
I think this achieves that elegantly unless there's something glaringly obvious I'm blind to.

Yes more and better tool's would be great but the issue here with additional features is dev time and the potential for undoing design decisions.

When a chisel break's you pear it down till it's sharp again, that's what I see this as.

if anyone can poke a hole in this please do.

Ralph, I agree that watchlists were a huge blow to mercs but I personally don't want to see a change like this. I like the current functionality we have in locator agents, but I think there's a ton of ways to make it better. I just don't have faith that CCP will give us a bone to chew on without completely making it worse.

I run locates on offline targets everyday for the sole purpose of finding out where they operate, which routes they take, and so on... Then I send my eyes or do whatever I have to do to hunt them. Yeah without a pinging notification letting me know they are online, it's extremely bad... but I'm a selective hunter now. I no longer care about waiting for the watchlist to tell me when a mining fleet logs on so I can kill. I'm going after high-value targets so that this poopsock activity of camping them till the log on is worth it.

Is it the most fun thing to do? A lot of the time, no.. but there are better ways to determine if someone is or isn't offline than typing their name into a search box and pressing ok. I would actually say that it would be slower to do this than the methods that are already known.

Might want to revise what the word "free" means there buddy

To a point yes , however this is not passive nor should it scale to a useful level for groups in null sec as far as I can tell,
This doesn't undo the buddy list.
there's no notification that someone has logged on or off
you're not being told anything as you have to explicitly check each one ,
You're not able to monitor as it's a binary response, it's horrifically inefficient and time consuming .

With this you need to fly to a locator, check your names till one takes, then fly to another and run more names
the amount of time sunk on this is ridiculous for anything more than a handful of names and that's the balancing factor.
And that's not taking into account the work needed to gain access to the agents in the first place.

This cost's time, effort (grinding out a useful number of agents takes week's of PvE), isk, involves flying about from agent to agent which puts me on a predictable route.

This is anything but Free and it's infact more respectful of your privacy than the current system.
Currently I can preload on intelligence and setup an ambush while you're at work or dropping the kids off to school,
You're not doing anything wrong here.
With this tweak I can't do that, you're going to have to screw up while you're online,
or I'm go to have to do all my tracking and recon whilst you're online.

That is one perspective.

The long exaggerated perspective that you use to try to market an idea.

The other perspective is you've been doing this for years you already have your characters standings ground, and in place. You also have access to the various locates-R-us channels. All of these are true. A brand new merc may need to do this, but while he does, you still have all the guys who have been doing this for years and already have all of this sorted.


You don't need to know where every person in a corp is, just the couple that you were interested in, or the few that the rest the corp would follow, and who would likely go out and 'create content' for that corporation, like the CEO's or directors, if they were to move to another region while under war dec.


So your system you just plug in those 2-3 names your after... and......


"okay the freighter guy is offline..... the CEO is offline.... and the director(s) are offline.... I don't need to bother going over there and checking. Best case is there's a guy in a procurer out mining, and CODE. will likely take care of that anyway. I don't really care about that procurer, I want the freighter or Orca."


Or:


"Oh they're online, these dudes over there are not, I'm gonna go over here and try to catch these guys while they're online."




As far as I'm concerned, Online/Offline is FAR more valuable intel than where. If I've done my homework right, I can figure out the relative where without too much effort. Knowing if someone is online is soooo much more useful. Your system provides that intel directly. You don't see how this can be used by larger bloc's? Lemme just enter in the 3 main FC's for so and so. Oh... all offline, right, lads, let's go siege that tower.



What I'm reading is 'CCP it's too hard for me to kill people in High sec. People have too many options for avoiding me while I'm trying to war dec them. Make it easier please!' I will give you the same answer us guys who were in the business of Low/Null sec mercenary work received when CCP destroyed our nomadic lifestyle with jump fatigue, and still receive to this day: HTFU.


You want a balanced locator agent? Put it on an hour or 2 delay, and have it give you a region or constellation, regardless of distance or online or not. Puts you close, to where they were, but does not give you the specifics of whether they are online or offline, or exactly what system they are in. That or delete locators all together. Horrid concept anyway.




@Scipio: The whole point of removing watchlists was to know when people were online. Plain and simple. Capitals/Supercaps was just 1 application of it. Any system short of eyes on target that provides that intel should be rejected.


-1 stands. Bad idea, not needed, goes against progress made with the deletion of watchlists, and impedes counter game play options to war decs.

The problem with watchlists revolved around super capital hunting. Isnt it ironic that the watchlist change happened right after members of wrecking crew posted about how they used scrapers with the log server to get instantaneous notifications out of game when a person of interest would log into Eve. If i remember correctly they had it interface with irc so they could literally be playing another game, watching tv in another room, or riding a bike down the street and get an instantaneous ping that someone was online. This is very different to how the other 99% of eve players used watch lists, but I will agree that it was instant intel.

There isnt anything wrong with locators other than they could maybe go through some revamping (as long as they maintain their current uses) and are the only thing keeping people from wandering through vast amounts of systems in search for a needle in a haystack. I know a bunch of people cant sympathize with that, nor do they care because it isnt something they have to use.

Your comment about it creating a work around I disagree with. Ralph is a bud of mine bit i disagree with his post. I think that typing their name into a locate to find out if they are online is more clicks and effort than what we have to do now. Sure the current method is a pain if you wardec a huge alliance and want to randomly hunt some of their members, but I highly doubt Ralph and friends were adding every single member of GSF to their watchlist in order to see who was online. So yeah the current method isnt good for finding out instantaneously who is and isnt online in a huge list of people. Im just glad we can still run locates.

A very tricky question that there isn't a clear answer to, but completely irrelevant to giving locators a way to tell you if people are online or not.


Which they will have to do if they're going to tell you any form of I can't find this guy because reasons, when they would otherwise.

there is your relevance , hows wh space looking without the ludicrous isk facets eh?


im looking for a compromise here, would you care to contribute to un-****ing empire war or just dump all over an attempt at it??

I like this idea as long as the cost and the time it takes to get an answer correspond to how far away your target it.

As well, maybe you only can get the specific Constellation they are in.
Or maybe you might get old information like were they've been with some hint of that.
And, maybe you could get info of someone that fits that description in multiple locations.
Also, maybe the target could pay Concord a fee to make it harder or cost more to find them, maybe modified by their various social skills.

Anything other than you pay your small fee and you get perfect information like it was.